Wednesday 18th December 2024
Danny Howell writes:
I am currently reading Edward Thomas, From Adlestrop To Arras, a biography of the poet by Jean Moorcroft Wilson, published by Bloomsbury in 2015.
On page 122 I came across a mention of Edward Thomas staying in Warminster during the autumn of 1903 with his life-long friend and former Oxford scholar John Hartmann Morgan, who was working in Warminster.
Jean Moorcraft Wilson spells Morgan’s middle name with as Hartmann, but references to him online and elsewhere spells it with only one n.
It is not mentioned what the work was that Morgan was doing in Warminster, but earlier in the book Wilson writes that Thomas and Morgan had met at Lincoln College, that Morgan had graduated from the University College of South Wales, and that the brilliant career ahead of him included his becoming a professor of Constitutional Law at the University of London, a brigadier in the British Army, and a M.P.
There is a Wikipedia page for John Hartman Morgan (20 March 1876 – 8 April 1955) giving greater details and a list of his publications.
Wilson, in her biography of Edward Thomas, notes that he stayed soon after his Warminster visit, with Morgan again, sharing lodgings on Salisbury Plain (the exact location is not named). Thomas’s time here was spent writing reviews and talking with Morgan. Thomas wrote: “So much talking I never did before and I am led to believe that it is good for me.”
Both visits, to Warminster and on Salisbury Plain, were like Thomas’s many stays in many places, excuses for him to get away from his wife and children.
I wonder what Edward Thomas thought of Warminster, and as he was fond of mentioning place names in some of his poems, I find it a pity he didn’t mention Warminster or write about it in some detail in his prose.